The third and final block of the first lady featured Elanor Roosevelt, played by Gillian Anderson. This one took place earliest in the series and was used to frame the other two in the form of letters being passed down from first lady to first lady. This one once again had some amazing sets and opportunity for great vintage design and recreations.
This is block 2 of the First Ladies, starring Michelle Pfeiffer. Set from the 1930s to the 60s and 70s, it was very interesting doing all the research and recreating the look of the various periods. We were liberty to recreate many things as accurately as possible, which was a blast.
Growing up I have long been a fan of musicals, and I couldn’t have been more excited to join the art dept of an excellent one starring Ben Platt, with songs by Pasek and Paul. It was an amazing experience with a truly great art dept, and I couldn’t have been happier with the results. I ‘ve posted some selections here, but as always there’s more behind the scenes that didn’t make it in!
A year ago I had the pleasure of working with some talented Graphic designers on a few side-projects for various networks. Although it wasn’t for very long in each instance, I had a blast and got to make some interesting work! I’ve included a bunch of portfolio items from each below!
Got to work with the excellent Jeff Sage again on this Melissa McCarthy film, originally slated for a fall 2019 release, but ended up coming out Nov 2020. A romantic comedy about a super intelligent general AI trying to understand the upside about humanity. Very fun film with some beautiful sets.
For MacGyver The producers wanted an American Gothic style painting that could be in a dream sequence to add a sense of surrealism to a scene. I had the idea of adding a lightbulb instead of a pitchfork, and I reconstructed an abstract scene with stock imagery. While the general composition is similar, all elements were original. To add a painted-look I did a combination of filters, smudging and paint-over to achieve an interesting, textured effect. It was printed on canvas and the painters did a transparent paint-over to add some additional depth. The producer liked it so much he insisted we send him the original for the writers room. See below for a short video showing the different layers.
Here’s how it looked on set
Here’s a video clip showing the layers:
Trying something different here. I thought I’d just include a smattering of graphics from the project to show the breadth of the project, rather than organizing by type of item. The Film Irresistible was great fun to work on and the script was very funny. I was very proud of my work on it and I was glad to meet Jon Stewart who was essentially the news, back when I was in college.
Here’s a bunch of random renderings and pre-viz I did for Raising Dion. Some are more concept, some are just placement for a piece of artwork I generated.
For MacGyver and Raising Dion they needed some fictional movie posters for set dec and playback so I made these. Got to play with some fun Photoshop compositing techniques. Notably Raising Dion was a Netflix show and they allowed us to use the actual titles of real films for our posters, as long as we agreed to avoid real artwork, as their standards and practices are far less strict than network TV.
In Macgyver S4E3 we visit Germany and encounter a particularly sinister relic of WW2, one that has been causing mayhem and fear long after the war. I got to make a large-scale schematic of the detonation mechanism based on loads of research on the actual device. I also got to design a fun “goodbye Adolf” graffiti for the bomb itself, which got heavily featured and made a cool appearance in the intro for the episode! Really fun project!
